Puppet Consulting

Puppet is a configuration management and infrastructure automation tool used to define and enforce a desired state across fleets of servers. It is commonly used by system administrators and DevOps teams to standardize operating system settings, packages, services, and application prerequisites so environments remain consistent as infrastructure grows. Puppet helps reduce configuration drift and supports repeatable provisioning by applying declarative policies across development, staging, and production.

In typical workflows, teams organize reusable modules and data (for example, with Hiera) and promote changes through controlled environments, enabling governance and auditability alongside day-to-day operations. For additional context on infrastructure automation practices, see DevOps consulting.

• Declarative resource definitions to manage packages, files, users, and services
• Reusable modules and role/profile patterns for standardized server builds
• Environment-based promotion of configuration changes with reviewable code
• Data-driven configuration to separate policy from implementation details
• Ongoing enforcement to detect and correct configuration drift

With the rise of Infrastructure-as-Code tools for provisioning infrastructure (such as Terraform), and Orchestration tools for running containers (such as Kubernetes), the need for Configuration Management decreased as it was used mostly to configure Operating Systems and provision resources.

However, there are still use-cases where companies manage the servers' Operating System directly, and they do so using Configuration Management tools.

A number of examples where managing the servers directly is required:

1. Bare-Metal or On-Premise servers
   Can't provision infrastructure using Infrastructure-as-Code tools (such as Terraform), and can't use fully-managed services for orchestration such as Kubernetes.
   In such cases Configuration Management tools will be used to manage groups of servers, install the applications' dependencies & configuration, and perhaps even install an orchestration tool such as Kubernetes.
2. Specific system requirements
   A given company might choose not to use an orchestration tool as a result of specific system requirements.
   An example would be a company that provides an SDK that communicates with the company's servers, and is implemented in clients' apps and systems, with a requirement by the clients that the SDK takes less than 5ms to respond.
   In that case the networking toll orchestration systems like Kubernetes have on every request will be unacceptable, and so that company will be forced to optimize for a very simple network topology with minimal "hops" between different parts of the system.

There is also the case where companies started with Configuration Management as their main way of building a platform for the developers, and the coupling to the Configuration Management tool became too complicated to be worth "untangling" in the short-term or even mid-term.

Puppet is a configuration management and infrastructure automation tool used to define and enforce a desired state across fleets of servers. It is commonly chosen to standardize system configuration, reduce drift, and make infrastructure changes repeatable at scale.

• Declarative desired-state model that continuously converges systems to the intended configuration, reducing configuration drift.
• Idempotent runs that make changes safely repeatable, which helps when applying the same baseline across many nodes.
• Centralized policy enforcement for OS hardening, package versions, services, and files, improving consistency across environments.
• Reusable modules and role/profile patterns that support maintainable configuration code and shared building blocks.
• Hiera-driven data separation that enables environment, region, and node-specific configuration without duplicating manifests.
• Scales to large fleets with agent-based reporting and a server-backed catalog workflow suited to long-lived infrastructure.
• Rich ecosystem of supported modules for common services, speeding up adoption for standard components.
• Built-in reporting and run history that improves auditability and troubleshooting of configuration changes.
• Supports phased rollout strategies via environments and code control workflows, reducing risk during change deployment.
• Strong fit for compliance-oriented baselines where ongoing enforcement matters more than one-time provisioning.

Puppet is typically a good fit for organizations managing many persistent servers across multiple environments and datacenters, especially where configuration drift and compliance controls are recurring concerns. Trade-offs include learning curve for the DSL and module design patterns, and the operational overhead of running Puppet infrastructure compared to simpler agentless approaches.

Common alternatives include Ansible, Chef, and Salt, with Terraform often used alongside Puppet for provisioning cloud resources and Puppet used for OS and application configuration.

Our experience with Puppet helped us establish repeatable configuration patterns, delivery workflows, and governance controls that clients used to standardize server builds and roll out infrastructure changes safely across environments.

Some of the things we did include:

• Reviewed existing Puppet codebases (manifests, modules, Hiera, environments) and delivered prioritized remediation plans to improve maintainability, testing, and change safety.
• Designed roles/profiles architectures with clean Hiera data separation and environment promotion to reduce drift between development, staging, and production.
• Built and hardened baseline modules for OS configuration, package lifecycle management, users/SSH, sudo policies, time sync, and service configuration across Linux fleets.
• Scaled Puppet Server and PuppetDB deployments, including compile performance tuning, catalog optimization, and certificate lifecycle practices for large node counts.
• Automated provisioning-to-convergence workflows by pairing Terraform with Puppet bootstrapping to ensure instances reached a consistent desired state after creation.
• Integrated Puppet changes into CI/CD with code review gates, linting, unit testing, and controlled rollouts aligned to existing release processes.
• Implemented secrets handling patterns by integrating Puppet with Vault to reduce credential sprawl and support rotation-friendly runtime retrieval.
• Improved auditability by shipping Puppet reports and logs into ELK Stack for searchable evidence, compliance reporting, and troubleshooting dashboards.
• Standardized application runtime configuration (systemd units, config templates, dependencies, and service health checks) to reduce deployment variance and speed incident recovery.
• Supported migrations from ad-hoc shell scripts and legacy tooling into Puppet, including module refactoring, phased cutovers, and operator runbooks to minimize risk.

This experience helped us accumulate significant knowledge across multiple Puppet use-cases—multi-environment delivery, scale and performance tuning, and day-2 operations—and enables us to deliver high-quality Puppet setups that are maintainable, testable, and reliable for clients.

Some of the things we can help you do with Puppet include:

• Review your current Puppet estate (control repo, environments, modules, manifests, and Hiera data) and deliver a prioritized assessment report with remediation steps.
• Create an adoption roadmap that standardizes configuration management across teams, including branching strategy, promotion flow, and release governance.
• Design and implement reusable modules and roles/profiles to enforce consistent OS baselines and application configuration at scale.
• Modernize delivery by integrating Puppet code changes into Git-based reviews and CI/CD pipelines for safer, repeatable rollouts.
• Implement security and compliance guardrails (least privilege, hardened baselines, patching standards, and audit-friendly controls) to reduce drift and risk.
• Optimize performance and cost by tuning agent run cadence, catalog compilation, environment layout, and Puppet infrastructure sizing.
• Troubleshoot and remediate failures end-to-end (certificates, connectivity, environment mismatches, and data lookup issues) to restore reliable runs.
• Improve observability with actionable logs, metrics, and alerts around configuration changes to speed incident response and reduce MTTR.
• Enable your team with hands-on training, module standards, and maintainable patterns aligned to Puppet documentation.